In recent years, the life cycles of industrial products, particularly electronic devices, have become extremely short due to more intensification in development competition between manufactures. Under such circumstances, the manufacturers for the electronic device manufacturing apparatus are required to provide manufacturing apparatus that can ensure high productivity for products and maintain it. More specifically, it has been demanded to provide manufacturing apparatuses that can manufacture more products at the same time and can perform the same amount of productions with a smaller number of apparatuses.
In order to ensure and maintain the high productivity, there is need of an effective operation of the apparatus used in manufacturing the products. The operational management of the apparatus for production at the plant is performed using generally the operation rate as an index. Regarding the operation rate of the apparatus, the value under test conditions is generally decided, but is different depending on the client's operational condition. For this reason, the operation rate of the apparatus is decided between a vendor that provides apparatuses and the manufacturer that is a user. For example, when an operational reference is set to the operation rate of 90% with respect to a certain apparatus, the manufacturer that uses the apparatus and the vendor that supports the apparatus perform the maintenance management of the apparatus such that the operating state of the apparatus satisfies the above value.
The maintenance management can be largely divided into corrective maintenance, breakdown maintenance, and preventive maintenance. In general, corrective maintenance is mainly performed to operate the apparatus stably at the initial time of using the apparatus. Then, after the apparatus satisfies a predetermined operation rate and the apparatus reaches a stable operating state, the breakdown maintenance and preventive maintenance become important to keep the operating state. The breakdown maintenance indicates posterior maintenance management that is provided after trouble occurs in the apparatus. The preventive maintenance is preventive maintenance management that identifies the location where occurrence of trouble is predicted to provide maintenance management to the location intensively.
Furthermore, the operation rate can be expressed by [(operational time)−(stop time)]/(operational time)×100 (%). Operational time is time for which the apparatus should be in an operational status. Accordingly, a value obtained by subtracting stop time from the operational time, indicates effective (real) operation time of the apparatus. As is obvious from this equation, in order to obtain high operation rate to ensure high throughput, it is necessary to shorten operation stop time of apparatus.
As a method for shortening stop time, there is known a method in which maintenance management system that performs maintenance management (breakdown maintenance) of the apparatus is automated to shorten sudden stop time such as trouble occurrence time and the like. For example, information exchange on the apparatus operational status and trouble status between the vendor and the manufacturer is made online to be automated; thereby this can be carried out. Unexamined Japanese Patent Application KOKAI Publication No. H11-15520 discloses a remote-monitoring (remote-maintaining) system, which makes such breakdown maintenance efficient, between the single vendor and the manufacturer.
The above-disclosed remote-marinating system is composed of apparatuses provided at a plurality of plants, a host computer for monitoring provided at each plant, and a host computer for management, which is connected to the host computer of each plant via a communication line and which is provided at a vendor's office that supplies the apparatuses. The host computer at the plant (manufacturer) side always monitors the apparatus. While, the host computer at the vendor side monitors whether there is a report on trouble occurrence and obtains it if there is a report on trouble occurrence. Then, the host computer at the vendor side analyzes the report on trouble occurrence and transmits information indicating treatment to the plant side.
However, in the above-disclosed remote-maintenance system is structured such that the host computer for monitoring is directly connected to the apparatus to perform transmission, and it is preferable that monitoring and transmission are separately performed. Moreover, since the production is uniquely placed in the apparatus, there is a possibility that the method for transmitting a large amount of data including other data excepting one for remote-maintenance to the vendor via the host computer will decrease the throughput of the apparatus, and this is not realistic.
By the way, regarding the way of thinking about the maintenance management, the preventive maintenance “fix before breakdown” is becoming the mainstream instead of the breakdown maintenance “fix after breakdown”. The preventive maintenance can prevent trouble occurrence and reduce the sudden stop of the apparatus by sufficient preventive maintenance. However, even in when the preventive maintenance is performed, it is necessary to stop the apparatus, and the frequent or inefficient preventive maintenance reduces the substantial operation rate of the apparatus and suppresses productivity. In addition, the preventive maintenance can execute not the sudden maintenance but a planed maintenance to make it possible to carry out a planned production. For this reason, as a system for ensuring the high operation rate of apparatus, there has been a system that is capable of carrying out efficient maintenance management including the preventive maintenance.